


Dog Days

by Wisperwind



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Gamling Addiction, Werewolves, danger to animals that is resolved and nothing actually happens to the animal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27281104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wisperwind/pseuds/Wisperwind
Summary: Jonouchi is a werewolf without a pack, trying his best to find his place in the world. A lost dog and a friendly face might be exactly what he needed.
Relationships: Honda Hiroto | Tristan Taylor & Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Heka: A Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Fan Project





	Dog Days

From  _ the _ moment he is born, the wilderness is in his blood. The stars sing him lullabies when his mother’s voice grows tired. The wind runs with him and plays games with him when his sister is still too young to properly play with. The earth tells him stories of the people that walked it before him.

He learns how to listen from the whispers of the trees behind the school, and then to shut his ears when his parents start fighting again and again and again.

He learns to read the tremors of the earth from the footsteps of squirrels and hones this skill on his father’s thunderous temper.

His sense of smell first sharpens, then dulls at the constant stench of alcohol that seeps into his home. 

One night in early January, when he is all of nine years old, he wakes up to the round silver disc of the moon, large and bright, shining right into his room like a searchlight. It draws him out of bed, out of the house, and away into the night. 

In the morning, when he returns with rabbit fur stuck in his teeth and his hands still bloody and shaped like claws, his mother will scream at him for the last time. She calls him “monster” and “demon” and his father a liar, and by the end of the day, she and his sister have vanished from his life entirely. 

Something breaks that day, although it would take Katsuya years to learn what exactly it was.

* * *

He keeps in contact with his sister, against the odds. Sometimes he thinks that’s the only thing keeping him sane. He spends most of his meager allowance on postage, as his father has forbidden him from using the phone since he found out who he was calling. 

“Your mother left you,” he would say. “There’s no need to keep trying.”

His father doesn’t understand that Katsuya has already forgotten his mother’s scent, and the softness of her hands on him. He has no care for the woman who took his sister from him, but Shizuka was practically still a baby, and she is now alone with the woman who saw her son, crying and scared and confused about what was happening to him, and called him a monster. 

It has been years now since that incident and Katsuya has learned. He is not a monster, or at least that’s what his father says. Katsuya is a werewolf. The moon calls to him, changes him, and sends him to hunt. In return, he is blessed with heightened senses for the other 29 days of the lunar cycle. Katsuya’s father is not a were himself, but apparently his great grandfather was. The Blood, as his father calls it, is not especially thick in their family. No one had expected for Katsuya to be what he is.

No one had told his mother that it could be a possibility.

His father is an angry creature, driven by impulse rather than thought. He drinks his days away and gambles away his nights. Money becomes an issue quickly, and so Katsuya falls in with Hirutan and his gang early on in middle school. Their den smells like cheap beer and cigarette smoke so much that Katsuya instantly feels at home. He makes money running with them. Not enough, it’s never enough. It could be a million yen and it would only be fed to his father’s addictions. But so far it has kept food on the table, and that’s what’s important.

His letters to Shizuka grow fewer in number, and shorter, too, as Katsuya finds himself unable to tell her about what is going on in his life. When she asks him about his friends, is he supposed to mention Hirutani? The guy is two years older than him and only speaks to him in barked orders or sleazy, false appreciation. 

When she asks about school, should he tell her that he’s failing because, even if he could afford the necessary books, he’d have no time to study and no place to do so in peace? So his responses become more vague, and hers grow more worried until Katsuya stops talking about himself at all, and only asks his sister to tell him about her life once a month. 

This new status quo does not change until one day, while on his way home from another run delivering undefined goods in a nondescript bag to an inconspicuous location, Katsuya takes a shortcut through a park. 

He’s minding his own business like he always is when he hears shouting. He focuses. Some ways away on the other end of the park there is a boy around his age, shouting for…. his blankey? That can’t be right.

Katsuya knows better than to stick his nose into things that aren’t his business, but the guy seems genuinely distressed and despite his current occupation, Katsuya hasn’t quite learned yet how to be a heartless, uncaring bastard. 

“Blankey! Blankey, come back here, girl! Blankey where are you?!” The boy shouts and now that Katsuya is closer he can see the broken leash he’s clutching in his hand. That explains it.

He should leave. His father is expecting him home. It’s getting dark and this has nothing to do with him either way, but- But it’s getting dark and he can’t leave the guy looking for his dog on his own at night. That’s just inviting trouble.

“Hey!” he shouts, “You need help?” 

The boy whirls around and stares at him, taking in the torn and dirty clothes, the smell of smoke and booze that clings to his skin, the large, dark bags under his eyes and the bat that sticks out of his backpack. He swallows, then nods. “Yeah. Yeah I guess I could use some help.” 

Oh man, that guy must be desperate. There is no way that Katsuya looks even slightly respectable or trustworthy right now. “How long have you  _ been  _ here?” He blurts out. 

The guy just shakes his head. “I don’t know. It was around noon when I took Blankey out for a walk, but there was this squirrel and she tore her leash and now I can’t find her and-”

“Wow, wow. Slow down. Are you telling me you’ve been here for six hours and she hasn’t come back yet?” The guy looks at him through what Katsuya thinks are the beginnings of tears and nods.

That’s not normal. Dogs run off all the time, but they usually return soon enough as well. It’s no fun to be away from the pack for long. If it’s been this long and she still hasn’t come back she’s either lost or trapped somewhere. 

“Alright, I’ll help you look for her. What’s she look like? Big? Small? I’m assuming big since she managed to tear the leash?”

“She’s a dobermann, so pretty big, yeah. Black and brown. She’s a sweetheart, she wouldn’t just run off like that.”

“It’s okay. We’ll find her.” He puts a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Normally, Katsuya would just try to sniff her out. He has a sharper nose than humans do after all, but this is a dog park. There are too many dog-smells for him to pick out a specific one of a dog he’s never met before. 

So instead he listens. He filters out the chirping birds and rustling leaves, the noises of cars and people on the other side of the fence. The dog park closes soon, so there aren’t many people around anymore. It’s why Katsuya took this shortcut in the first place. He hears some barking form further into the park to their left, but it sounds high pitched and happy, and is accompanied by kids laughing so he filters that out. To their right is the burbling and gurgling of a small stream that runs along the eastern border of the park. A few frogs croak their evening songs here, but there are no dog-like noises, so Katsuya moves on. 

It takes him a while, but of all his senses, his hearing has always been the best. A soft whining comes from just ahead. It’s a quiet and pitiful sound.

“Hey, let’s try this way,” he says, already moving towards the noise. “And keep calling her. Maybe she’ll bark or something and we’ll hear her.”

The boy seems too dazed to question the direction Katsuya is pulling him and for a brief moment he thinks that if he was Hirutani this guy would end the night with broken ribs, a missing wallet and still no dog. 

It’s a good thing that he’s not Hirutani then. 

He follows the whining, which gets louder as soon as the boy starts calling again. Through some thicket and across half the park, past a playground and the jippy dog Katsuya heard earlier, eventually they find her. As soon as they come into view, Blankey starts barking, trying and failing to jump up from where she is trapped. The torn end of her leash has wrapped around one of the ornate legs of a metal park bench and, in trying to free herself, the dog has only managed to tangle it all the more tightly. 

“Blankey!” The boy shouts and is on his knees in the dirt the next second. As soon as her collar is unclipped from the frankly unsalvageable leash, the dog is on top of him, licking his face and barking happily. 

It takes a while for the two of them to calm down, but once they do the boy gets back up, only to bow deeply to Katsuya. 

“Thank you for your help. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t found her.” 

Katsuya blushes and rubs the back of his head, tangling his already incredibly tangled hair even more. “Yes, well good thing you ran into me then! I’ll find anything. Better than any searchdog, me!”

He winces and, not for the first time in his life, wishes the gods had blessed him with less wolfblood and more of a brain-to-mouth filter. 

“I mean- I was happy to help. I’m glad we found your Blankey. What kind of a name is that, by the way? Sounds like something a baby would come up with.”

The guy stares at him for a moment before shaking his head. “Well you’re not wrong. My baby cousin named her. I’m Hiroto Honda by the way. Call me Honda.”

“Katsuya Jonouchi.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re with that guy Hirutani. Heard about it when they put you in Juvie last year.”

Katsuya winces harder this time. So much for making a good first impression. “Did you now. I’ll have you know that those charges were dropped and if anyone tells you anything different it’s all lies and slander.”

Honda laughs. “Sure man, whatever you say.” Then he holds out a hand. “Friends?”

Katsuya stares. Friends? He hasn’t had an actual friend in so long, not since before he first turned. He thinks he might have forgotten what friendship is supposed to feel like. Even Hirutan’s gang aren’t his friends. They are people he hangs out with when his house gets too suffocating. That’s not what friends are supposed to be, or at least Katsuya doesn’t think so.

Here, though, he has a chance to find out. He takes the hand. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Alright. Friends.” 

Maybe this is a bad decision. Maybe one day Honda will find out what Katsuya hides from the world, and just like mother he will run away screaming and cursing. Somehow, however, Katsuya doesn’t think so. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work is part of the HEKA fan project, which is a free PDF you can download at hekazine.tumblr.com. Please check it out if you liked this story and want to see more like it! I promise it looks so much better in the PDF then it does here.


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